by Sam Sykes
“Mm?” Mototaru grunted, when he had cleared his throat.
“How many of them will die if we send them upriver?” Gariath asked.
“Impossible to predict.”
Gariath took a breath. He drew in the scent of blood in water, of air bubbles bursting as they fled mouths wide in screams, of sodden lumber dragging flailing bodies to a sandy riverbed.
“Try,” he said.
Mototaru sighed and knuckled the small of his back, thrusting his prodigious belly forward. “If the scraws do not take the bait, there is no reason to assume that any of them would die. Without knowing what the scraws’ numbers are, we should plan for losing up to half of them and still having enough to put up a stiff resistance.”
“Resistance,” Gariath muttered, staring at the blue line of the Lyre on the map. “Resisting until they’re dead.”
“The plan would be to put pressure on the humans to allow the main force to overwhelm them,” Mototaru said. “Or draw the scraws out.” He puffed on his pipe. “Either way, not an easy job, no.”
“To sacrifice themselves to ensure victory,” Daaru grunted. “Any tulwar of any clan would answer the call. The Tul will return them to us, in another life, stronger and wiser for their sacrifice.”
“And what of their families,” Gariath said, more to himself than the others, “their starving children, their broken husbands and wives …”
Daaru glanced between Gariath and Mototaru, quirking a hairy brow. Mototaru, though, kept his eyes squarely on the dragonman.
“Daaru,” he said, “how long has it been since you wrote to your family?”
“I haven’t,” Daaru replied.
“Do that. Make it long. And thorough.”
Daaru opened his mouth to protest. But his stare lingered on Gariath, staring numbly down at the map, eyes blank and ear-frills folded, and he sighed. He shot a nod to Mototaru, collected his sword, and left their tiny war room, shutting the door firmly behind him.
Mototaru walked to the window, propped open its shutter long enough to empty his pipe of ash, then shut it and barred it. He plucked a small pouch of tobacco from his belt and began to pack his pipe anew as he walked slowly around the room, barring each window, checking the door to make certain it was locked.
Only when he had walked the entirety of the room did he produce a twig from his belt and light his pipe. He took several deep puffs as he casually strolled back to the map table and blew a long cloud of smoke across the painted cities and rivers.
“They don’t need you to save them.”
Mototaru didn’t even look at Gariath, staring off to somewhere far beyond the walls of their room.
“Even before you came into their lives, they were ready to die for this,” the old tulwar said. “It would have been useless, of course. They’d throw their lives away, wait for the Tul to return them, then throw that life away, too. They dream of their next lives being better. They know the one they have now is destined for suffering, for bloodshed.”
“Everyone thinks they’re ready to die,” Gariath said. “Until they do.” His claws unconsciously dug into the table, tearing the map slightly. “Then, when your heart’s about to give out and your last breath is in your throat, you realize what else you still have to do.”
“They have much to do,” Mototaru agreed. “They have crops to harvest. They have meat to hunt. They have children to hug, mates to fuck, swill to drink.” He blew a long breath of smoke. “None of that is as important as what we are doing here, now. They don’t need your sympathy. They need your leadership.”
“They have you.”
“Yes. The Humn who led them to ruin and ran away, leaving them to be hacked apart by dragonmen. They tolerate me as much as they do the malaa.” He snorted. “Speaking of which, the Mak Lak Kai have sent word back on the shicts. We should review it at the next—”
“Shicts,” Gariath growled. “On top of everything, there’s shicts.”
“I know. They get everywhere, don’t they?”
“Like bugs.”
“Exactly. They—”
“They are meant to be broken easily,” he said. “They are small, tiny, weak. And you tell me we must have a plan for them, too? Even they can kill so many …”
Mototaru’s stare might as well have been carved from stone. “Unsurprisingly, a creature as large as you is not very good at dancing around a subject. Speak your mind.”
Gariath looked to the old tulwar and he could feel something in his eyes, something weak and quavering that seemed to flinch under Mototaru’s stare. Something he dreaded to ask, and yet …
“When you led the Uprising,” he said, “you climbed to the top of the Silken Spire. You came back down and left. The tulwar were slaughtered in your absence.” He paused. “What did you see?”
Mototaru looked at him very carefully for a very long moment. He drew in a long breath of pipe smoke and let loose a cloud that covered his face.
“It’s not important,” he said.
“It is to me,” Gariath replied.
“Not to you,” Mototaru said, “not to me, not to anyone.”
“Tell me.”
Mototaru said nothing, looked somewhere else.
“Tell me,” Gariath growled.
Mototaru drew in another long breath.
“Tell me, you old fuck.” His roar was punctuated by the sound of a table leg splintering as his fist came down on the map. “If we’re to fight this war—”
“If we’re to fight this war, then the answer is not important,” Mototaru interrupted. “What’s begun cannot be stopped. Regardless of what I saw, regardless of what I did, many tulwar will die. Maybe all the tulwar will die. You can’t stop that. Knowing won’t stop that.”
“I need to—”
“I know what you need. I know what you think you need. You’re looking for a reason to stop, to walk away.” Mototaru gestured to the door. “Daaru’s dumb as a brick and even he can smell the cowardice coming off you. We’re lucky he’s not dumb as two bricks or he might tell someone else.
“I don’t claim to know who you were before you came to Shaab Sahaar, but I know you fought with only your own life in your hands. You feel unworthy to hold the others who have given you theirs. So you want me to tell you what happened, the one thing that’ll stop this all and make everyone go home.
“It doesn’t exist,” Mototaru said. “Nothing can stop this. If we run now, the humans will come for us. The tulwar know this. The tulwar know that this is where we die. It’s too late for this all to go back to the way it was. The only thing it’s not too late for …”
Mototaru sighed. The weight of his years seemed to bend him lower. The breath of pipe smoke came out a little more ragged.
“Is whether you want to be here when the first blood is spilled.”
Through the clouds of smoke covering it, Gariath stared at the map. His eyes fixed on the small red crosses painted on the parchment, the areas where they would strike. He could see them now: their high canyon walls, their long and lonely roads, their hot sand under hot feet.
He could see the blood fall upon them.
First, a drop.
Then, oceans.
And, without a word, he rose up and walked out of the room and into the night.
The Rhega did not bother to keep many historical records. Outside of a few common stories and a few choice words of contempt, the Rhega didn’t see much of a point. The primary reason being that nothing ever really changed.
Humans liked to write down the rise and fall of their empires, shicts liked to pass down songs of bravery and merit, tulwar liked to muse about their stupid past lives. They all liked to pretend they were important by calling it history, but they weren’t.
No matter what had happened in the past, humans were still weak, shicts were still cowards, tulwar were still stupid, and the Rhega would have to put up with it. This would never change.
And nothing has changed, he reminded himself.
&nbs
p; As he had been reminding himself for the past hour he had walked through the night-quiet streets of Jalaang.
“Rise up!”
Or almost night-quiet, at any rate.
Even as the moon hung high in the sky and the majority of the warriors had gone to their rest, the city’s conquerors were still active. Forges continued to ring out with hammer blows. Gaambol pits were still alive with hoots and gibbers. Fires lit the activities of elders as they traded stories of the previous Uprising while fletching arrows for those who were about to fight their own.
More were coming.
Sometimes they would arrive in hunting parties of six or seven. Sometimes they would come in their own war bands of a hundred or more. Sometimes it would be just one lone warrior with a grudge to settle from the Uprising. But every day, there were new tulwar in the city, new voices rising up as he passed, calling him daanaja like it was a compliment.
And still, nothing had changed.
The tulwar were still morons obsessed with their weird ideas of returning to life after death. They were still smelly, rude, and foolish. And, even if they were stronger than a human, they were still weak: Their bones broke, skin split, blood wept like anyone else’s.
Nothing changed. Nothing ever changed.
The tulwar had fought countless wars before, wars that had seen them dead by the thousands. This one was no different, he told himself. Just another war, like so many others, nothing different, nothing changed.
No reason for him to feel this way.
Like his legs were made of water and his bones were made of twigs, like his blood had all surged out of his limbs and welled up in his throat, like the scent of rotting meat was so thick in his nose that he couldn’t breathe …
He couldn’t breathe.
He took a sharp turn and hurried down an alley. The windows went dark and the shadows pressed closer as he went deeper into the city. Its unoccupied areas were dwindling by the day as warehouses were converted to barracks, but there were still a few points that were mercifully free of anyone who might see what happened next.
He fell against the wall of a nearby building. His nose was filled with the acrid scent of his own breath, his head full of the pounding of his heart. He felt like a pond struck by a stone, quivering and weak as he looked around for someone who might have seen him.
No one. Just shadows and the empty dirt of the alley.
He could leave now, he knew. The gate was not far. No one would see him. There would be confusion over the next few days, but then someone would elect Daaru to lead and they would go back to their fights. Whatever choices they made, then, would be theirs. They would be fighting for themselves, as they should be.
And it would be as if he’d never dragged them into this war just so he could take revenge.
A long, deep breath left him.
Nothing ever changed.
And no matter how many times he told himself this, the end thought was always the same.
You did this, he told himself. You started this war. And when they die, it’ll be you that killed them. He saw the road of flesh and sinew before his eyes. All of them. He smelled the stink of flesh and blood drying on the sand. Because of you.
No.
He started moving on bloodless legs, trudging in the direction of the gate. He couldn’t breathe. He had to get out of the city, into the open air, keep walking until he could breathe, even if it took miles. He tried to draw in a breath, gasped for air, but choked on the stink of blood and death and …
Anger. His nostrils quivered. Hair.
Someone was behind him. Another tulwar. He couldn’t go while someone was watching.
Deep breath, he told himself. Straighten up. Turn around, growl a little, chase them off. Then start running.
“This had better be good,” he rumbled as he turned around, “if you don’t want me to rip you—”
He saw the blade rushing toward him in one breath.
And he felt it the next.
His breath came back in a great gulp. His nostrils were filled with the scent of his own blood. His life splashed against his face in a dark red wash as a serrated edge tore through his shoulder.
A small part of him was able to appreciate how, if he hadn’t been turning around, it would have gone into his neck.
That small part, of course, was overshadowed by a larger part that was able to appreciate how it would feel to rip someone’s limbs off and beat them to death with them.
A roar tore from his throat. His hand lashed out. He felt cloth catch on his claws, heard it tear. But he felt no flesh splitting or blood spilling on his hand.
Through the blood dripping from his brow into his eye, he scowled down the alley at the shadow standing before him.
He didn’t know what else to call it.
It stood upright, had a body, but he wasn’t sure what else. It was wrapped in black, cloth hanging off it in tatters. A hood was drawn up over its head, nothing but a black, gaping hole where a face should be.
And though Gariath could see no eyes, he knew it was staring right at him as it raised a long knife dripping with his own blood and made a brief, mocking salute with it.
And then, it turned and ran.
And so did Gariath.
As thought left him, blood returned. His legs grew strong, and his heart beat with rage instead of fear. He tore off in pursuit as the shadow turned a corner.
Through the stink of his own blood, he could barely smell his assailant. It was as if it had no scent. No, he thought as he drew in a deep breath, it just smelled of hair and anger and shit, like any other tulwar.
Had Mototaru sent an assassin after him? To punish him for his weakness? Or had Daaru finally decided to take control?
Important questions. Gariath hoped he would remember to not crush the shadow’s throat so he could get some answers.
He turned a corner. Another alley stretched before him and already, the shadow was almost at its end, so far ahead of him in so short a time. It was as though it flew instead of ran.
But Gariath had killed lots of things before. Some of them had flown, too. Didn’t help them in the end.
He fell to all fours, letting out a roar as he charged after the shadow. He only barely felt the earth under him as he quickly closed the distance, the scent of the shadow’s stink growing stronger as he drew up on it, the reek of hair, of anger, and of …
His nostril quivered.
What was that? Alcohol?
No.
He saw the bright orange of a spark out of the corner of his eye.
Oil.
It fell from the rooftops and shattered on the streets in a spray of glass. A fireflask exploded on the dirt and immediately a wall of fire erupted in front of him, rising up from a stain of oil soaked into the earth.
Gariath skidded to a halt, snarled. On the other side of the fire, the shadow had come to a halt.
He heard the sound of a flint striking steel overhead, the whisper of flame catching. He looked up and saw a squat figure in leather, head wrapped up in cloth, holding a fireflask. Gariath braced to leap, but the figure turned and hurled the fireflask down the alley, away from him. It struck the earth and exploded into another wall of flame behind him.
A trap.
He scowled up. Through a wooden visor, the figure looked down at him and offered him a coy wave.
“Hfvf fhn, fsshflh.”
He turned back to the wall of flame.
And the shadow was in front of him.
And the blade was in his face.
He twisted out of the way, though not enough to keep the blade from biting into his side and ripping blood from him. He roared and leapt forward, into the blow, and reached out.
His hand wrapped around what he thought was a throat. He snarled, squeezed, and the shadow …
Simply disappeared.
Cloth crumpled in his fingers. The shadow stood away from him, out of his grip, out of his reach. He looked down at his empty hand for just a brea
th. And when he looked up again, the shadow was there.
And so was the blade.
It lashed out at him like a serpent; he narrowly avoided it. He snarled, swung for the shadow, and caught nothing but cloth and air as the shadow disappeared out of his hand and reappeared at his side, stabbing again, forcing him to dart away.
And again and again. Everywhere Gariath swung, clawed, struck, the shadow was gone. Everywhere Gariath looked, the blade was there, stabbing, biting, carving. Blood stained the sand, the walls, the blade; everywhere but his own claws. He would have convinced himself he was fighting a bad dream, were it not for the blade.
And as he felt the blood weep down his arm, it came to him.
He turned back to his foe, stopped watching the shadow, started watching the blade. Suicide, normally, but he only needed one blow. The blade lashed out, thrust right for his throat. His hand shot up, fingers wrapped around the serrated edge, and pulled hard.
He ignored the pain as the blade cut into his palm. All he felt was the weight of the shadow as he jerked it forward along with its blade. His free hand shot out in a fist and—
The crunch of bone. The impact of flesh. A groan of pain.
So it was real.
He let out a laugh, swung again. And the shadow was gone. The blade was still in his hand, but his foe had vanished. He caught movement out the corner of his eye and found his attentions drawn to the roof.
The shadow peered over the edge for just a moment before turning and disappearing.
“No,” Gariath snarled. “You forgot your knife.”
He leapt at the wall.
“You’ll remember it when I jam it up your asshole.”
The walls of Jalaang were rough, hewn from second-rate stone and sealed with cheap mortar. It was not hard for him to find crooks to scale the wall of the building and haul himself onto the roof.
He was breathless by the time he arrived. Breathless, bloody, and fading. But he didn’t think about any of that. He hardly even noticed. His nostrils were full of the reek of his own life, his tongue tasted the sharpness of his own teeth, and every part of him was straining, holding on so tightly to the anticipation of the pain and the flesh tearing under his claws and the blood dripping into his jaws …
